


Double Rainbow

by 2SpaceGays



Category: Batwoman (Comic), DCU (Comics)
Genre: Childbirth, F/F, Implied miscarriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-24
Updated: 2017-07-24
Packaged: 2018-12-06 04:47:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11593251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2SpaceGays/pseuds/2SpaceGays
Summary: Kate and Maggie's family grows - but not without some heartache along the way.





	Double Rainbow

The hospital room is huge. A maternity suite, they call it – a labour, delivery, recovery, and postpartum room all in one. The name suggests a degree of elegance completely disconnected from the sterile white corridors and worm linoleum floor of Gotham General, St. Luke’s and almost every other hospital in the city – in the  _country_. When she’d read about it, Maggie had assumed it to be hyperbole, until they’d be escorted into one of those very suites and she had laid her own eyes on what she would described as unrivalled extravagance a scarce few would be able to afford.

It's more hotel than hospital, specifically designed to mimic a relaxing home environment, she’d been told, but the furniture and decorating it contained was leagues beyond anything Maggie had in her old apartment. A home environment when you were a millionaire, maybe.  Which, as Kate had slyly pointed out, is exactly their market demographic.

With beautifully polished floorboards, plump, richly-coloured sofas, a spa-sized tub, and an entertainment unit complete with a 4k TV and the newest consoles, one might almost be lead to believe that no one had told the designers what the room was to be used  _for_ , or, if they had, just how messy delivering a baby could be. Though, to the nurses’ credit, they had cleaned up very quickly, even replacing the double-wide hospital cot with a king-sized bed.

Still, Maggie can't imagine anyone making use of the balcony or enjoying the admittedly magnificent city views, and, somewhat sourly, she wonders just how much of the state’s budget has gone into a room likely dusted more often than it's used – but, it had made Kate happy, so she can't complain, not even when the bill came out looking like it might include college tuition.

The whole thing is ludicrously far removed from the little room in Star City where she had delivered Jamie, which had boasted just a narrow cot for her and a lumpy bedside seat for Jim.  Hours within its soundproof walls have not diminished Maggie’s bewilderment – directed not just at the room, but at Kate, too, the wonderful, courageous, compassionate, adoring partner she had managed to find, and the doctors who had let them make not just one, but  _two_  remarkable girls, together.

Funny, that the sense of awe would hit her so hard now, hours after Ellen and Gabrielle had been delivered, while three of the four incredible women in her life dozed quietly – Kate beside her, and the twins in the nursery just down the hall.

Gazing at Kate, for once not tossing or turning or murmuring in her sleep, her brow smooth of furrows, and her hands unclenched, only her hair, crinkling and coarse with dried sweat, hinting at the hours pain she endured, Maggie can hardly breathe. Her fingers weave through her wife’s, feeling the familiar callouses on her fingertips and the scars on her knuckles, her throat vice-tight, her chest constricted, her chin dimpling with the effort not to cry.

The silence in the room, interrupted only by her wife’s soft, gentle breathing and the ticking of a clock on the far wall, is overwhelming. As if from some place outside of herself, Maggie watches as she eases away from Kate and abruptly stands. Pauses at the side of the bed for barely a second before she marches, stiff and hasty, from the room. The door clicks quietly closed behind her, and she sags boneless against it, sucking down deep, wobbling breaths of recycled air-conditioned air.

Outside Kate’s maternity suite is another world, one of stereotypical hospitals with linoleum floors and thick, pale blue hand rails racing all the way down the wide corridors. The sudden normalcy doesn’t even penetrate Maggie’s consciousness, glancing off its surface as she hurries onwards, following the colour-coded lines on the floor to the broad nursery window.

She stops. Stares. Searches for her babies amidst the hundred others, no division between the wealthy and the poor inside. After a desperate, fruitless hunt, she realises belatedly that the grid is arranged in alphabetical order, that she needs to look to the upper-middle of the rows and columns for the newborns with the same surname printed on the front of their transparent bassinets.

She finds them, finally, just as the ‘Kane-Sawyer’s start to blur. The relief bows her head, bringing her face to the cool glass just as the hot tears squeeze from her eyes and sobs burst from between her lips, shaking shoulders rarely so fragile.

Unsolicited, the obstetrician’s words come back to her, that fateful ultrasound the beacon of hope they had needed. “After every storm comes a rainbow,” she had sighed wistfully over Kate’s swollen, lubricated belly, “In your case, two.”

Maybe God loves her after all. 


End file.
